In the cooling autumn of 1139, shortly before a grand wedding is to be held at the Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Brother Cadfael sets off from the abbey to visit Brother Mark at the Saint Giles leper colony outside Shrewsbury. Passing the nuptial party, however—the fragile bride, looking like a prisoner between her two stern guardians, and the dismal groom, a loathsome aristocrat old enough to be her grandfather—he suspects that this union may be more damned than blessed. And when a savage murder disrupts the May-December marriage, Brother Cadfael is left with a dark and terrible mystery, the key to which is hidden in Saint Giles. Writing as Ellis Peters, linguist and scholar Edith Pargeter (1913–1995) created one of the great historical mystery sleuths in Brother Cadfael, the worldly Welsh Benedictine monk of Shrewsbury Abbey in 12th-century Shropshire, England. After a score of Brother Cadfael mysteries, and many others, Peters earned the Edgar Award, the Cartier Diamond Dagger, and enrollment in the Order of the British Empire (OBE) "for services to Literature."